Empire, Inequality, and the Arrogance Of
Power by Paul Street
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 14, 2006

One
of the great privileges of power is the right to attack others for doing
-- or allegedly doing (see below) -- exactly what you do without anybody
who matters calling you on your hypocrisy.

Think of the
affluent white Americans who criticize the alleged personal
irresponsibility, cultural inadequacy, and welfare dependency of the inner
city poor. Never mind that these wealthy Americans engage in an ongoing
orgy of conspicuous and ecologically toxic consumption. Forget that they
typically invest in and/or receive generous salaries from corporations
that receive massive public subsidies while cheating customers, subverting
regulations, deepening inequality, slashing wages and benefits, abandoning
communities, discriminating against women and minorities, and/or otherwise
contributing to human misery at home and abroad. Such blatant hypocrisy
generally proceeds without public notice or exposure.

The White House, to
give another example, declares that any state harboring terrorists is a
terrorist state and is therefore subject to just invasion and attack by
“the civilized world,” led of course, by Washington. It is left to the
lunatic fringe to point out that the leader of civilization would be
justly bombed by this standard since the U.S. happens to host such known
terrorists as Orlando Bosch, who collaborated in blowing up a civilian
Cuban airliner as part of a U.S. directed campaign against the Castro
government (see Noam Chomsky,
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
[New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2006], p. 6)

It is left to the
leftist denizens of the radical nuthouse to point out that U.S. foreign
policy has long used (state-) terrorist methods to slaughter masses of
innocent people in places like Vietnam (where American forces killed more
than two million people between 1962 and 1975) and Iraq, where more than a
million died from US-imposed economic sanctions during the 1990s. The
current US-led invasion of Iraq has killed more than 100,000 civilians.

Do the savage U.S.
torture camps and brutal state-terrorist “interrogation” techniques
maintained and conducted in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force
base, among other locations help the U.S. qualify as a fitting candidate
for punitive attack by “the civilized world?”

How about the role
that John Negroponte, current U.S. Director of National Intelligence,
played as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s? Negroponte ran
interference for the Honduran security forces in the U.S. Congress, making
sure that U.S. military assistance kept flowing to Honduras while those
forces conducted a brutal campaign of torture and massacre against that
nation's civilian populace. Negroponte’s main job in Honduras, however,
was to oversee the terrorist contra camps in Honduras, from which a C.I.A.-equipped
mercenary force launched repeated murderous attacks that killed masses of
Nicaraguan civilians (see Chomsky, Failed States, p. 151)

These are relevant questions only for the aforementioned nutcases.

VENEZUELA'S "VERY
EXTRAVAGANT FOREIGN POLICY"

Speaking of
Negroponte, he takes the powerful pot-calling-the-not-so-powerful
kettle-black game to a new level. A recent front-page New York Times
article on Venezuela’s foreign policy contains some very interesting
reflections from the United States' blood-soaked über-snoop. By
Negroponte’s observation, respectfully reported without properly stunned
amazement or derision by the Times, Venezuela’s president Hugo
Chavez is "spending considerable sums involving himself in the political
and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, this
despite the very real economic development and social needs of his own
country. It’s clear,” Negroponte told a Congressional hearing last month,
“he is spending hundreds of millions, if note more, for his very
extravagant foreign policy.” Negroponte’s tone of concern over Chavez's
"extravagance" was loyally repeated in the Times’ article, which
bore the ominous title “CHAVEZ
SEEKING FOREIGN ALLIES, SPENDING BILLIONS: Oil! Used in
Rivalry With U.S. for Influence in the Americas” (April 4, 1968).

Forget for a moment,
as the Times dutifully did, that the Chavez government has been
“using its oil revenues for the public good” by “doing what previous
elite-dominated [Venezuelan] governments failed to do: providing for the
basic political, social, and economic needs of the population. Oil
revenue,” Maria Paez Victor recently noted, “is now used for universal
health services, education at all levels, clean water, food security,
micro credits, support for small and middle range industry, land
distribution and deeds for de-facto owners, worker cooperatives,
infrastructure, such as roads and railways and support for independent
community radio,” leading to significant ongoing improvements in the
social health of Venezuela (Maria Paez Victor, “Mr.
Danger and the Socialism for the New Millennium,” Speech to
the University of Toronto Walter Gordon/Massey Symposium, March 15,
2006).

And forget also that
Chavez’s supposedly “extravagant” and power mad (Donald Rumsfeld recently
likened Chavez to Adolph Hitler) foreign policy appears to alleviate and
counter economic and social problems and abroad and thus stands in sharp
contrast to the regressive dictates and outcomes of U.S. foreign policy.
Chavez, by the Times’ own account, has “been subsidizing… eye
surgery for poor Mexicans and even heating fuel for poor families from
Maine to the Bronx to Philadelphia.” He has helped Argentina overcome its
foreign debt and given $3.8 million in foreign aid to four African
nations. In the Bronx last winter, the Times reports, Venezuela’s
oil corporation Citgo “provided heating fuel at a 40 percent discount to
some 8,000 low-income residents of 75 apartment buildings.”

IMPERIAL HOMELAND
PRIORITIES

Put all that aside
and reflect upon the curious fact, naturally not mentioned by the Times,
that the U.S. is a great perpetrator when it comes to the crime of
sacrificing domestic social and economic health and development to the
pursuit of an "extravagant foreign policy" involving massive interference
in the internal affairs of other nations.

The U.S. spends more
than $500 billion each year on an imperial defense budget that maintains
more than 720 military bases located in nearly every country on the
planet, including many in Central and Southern America.

But this is only one
way in which Uncle Sam “involv[es] himself in the political and economic
life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere.” Other forms of
such involvement include the powerful and regressive neoliberal economic
interventions of the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund and World
Bank, the vast reach of American corporate media and consumer culture, the
ubiquitous political pressure of U.S. “diplomacy,” the placement of
explicitly propagandistic “news” stories in foreign newspaper and
television, and the flooding of Central American markets with highly
subsidized U.S. agricultural exports.

The U.S. government
has even been known to invade and occupy other, formerly sovereign states,
smashing their existing nation-state and insisting that the occupied
nations develop in accord with U.S. imposed politico-economic dictates.

How "extravagant"
(and expensive) is all that?

All of this global
extravagance transpires while:

* More than 37
million residents of the United States (which US Senator Kay Bailey
Hutchinson [R-Texas] calls "the beacon to the world of the way life should
be") languish beneath the federal government's notoriously low poverty
level ($15,219 for a family of three in 2004).

* More than 13
million or 18 percent of US children live below that sorry measure, and
the US child poverty rate is substantially higher than that of other
industrialized nations.

* 15.6 million
Americans live at LESS THAN HALF the inadequate U.S. poverty level,
comprising 42 percent of the nation's giant poverty population.

* More than one in
three US children live in or near poverty and more than 8 million
Americans live in homes that frequently skip meals or eat too little.

* More than 45
million Americans lack health coverage, making up 16 percent of the U.S.
population. The U.S. is still the only modern industrialized state without
a universal, socially inclusive health insurance plan.

* The top 1 percent
owns more than 40 percent of the wealth in the U.S.

* The top 10 percent
owns two-thirds of US wealth, leaving the rest of us -- 90 percent of the
population -- to fight it out for one third of the nation's assets.

* The net worth (all
assets minus all liabilities) of the typical black family in the U.S. is
around $8000, roughly 7 percent of the typical white family's net worth --
that’s seven black cents on the white dollar.

* As the Times
acknowledged in a front-page story last May, “Life
at the Top Isn't Just Better, It's Longer” because "class
is a potent force in health and longevity in the United States. The more
education and income people have, the less likely they are to have and die
of heart disease, strokes, diabetes and many types of cancer.
Upper-middle-class Americans live longer and in better health than
middle-class Americans, who live longer and better than those at the
bottom. And the gaps are widening, say people who have researched social
factors in health. As advances in medicine and disease prevention have
increased life expectancy in the United States," Times reporter J.
Scott elaborated, "the benefits have disproportionately gone to people
with education, money, good jobs and connections. They are almost
invariably in the best position to learn new information early, modify
their behavior, take advantage of the latest treatments and have the cost
covered by insurance."

* Unequal health
care contributes to more than 100,000 black Americans dying earlier than
whites each year. Middle-aged black men die at nearly twice the rate as
white men of a similar age.

I could go on and
on. The list of the “very real” but all-too unmet “economic development
and social needs” and savage racial and related class disparities in the
imperial “homeland” is practically endless. It is also getting bigger with
time. As the Times reported (along with the rest of "mainstream" media)
earlier this year, the Bush II administration has seen the U.S. poverty
rate rise during every single year of its existence. That terrible
measure has never gone up each year for five straight years until now.

This remarkable
record of worsening misery at the bottom of the United States’ steep
socioeconomic pyramid partly reflects the deliberate bankrupting of social
programs through a militantly plutocratic program of massive tax cutting
that primarily benefits the already super-wealthy.

It also reflects the
huge social and democratic opportunity cost of the imperial state’s
addiction to an extravagantly expensive militarism. The U.S. spends nearly
as much on what it deceptively calls “defense” as the rest of the world.
In 2002, the U.S. military budget was 30 times bigger than the combined
spending of the seven official U.S. "rogue" states -- Cuba, Iran, Iraq,
Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria (when will Venezuela be added to the
list?) -- who together spent $14.4 billion. The seven "rogue" enemies plus
Russia and (long-term Pentagon obsession) China together spent $116.2
billion, equal to just 27.6% of the U.S. military budget.

TAX DAY

Meanwhile, here’s
how the National Priorities Project (NPP) breaks down the tax bill
American paid for 2005, by the end of which the invasion of Iraq had cost
more than $270 billion. Let's say you paid Uncle Sam $1,000 last April.
Your patriotic investment in the American public sector was used as
follows:

* $285 went to the
military, what the federal government likes to call “defense" and what
would more accurately be called "empire."

* $200 went to
"health care": all health spending by the federal government, including
federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid.

* $180 went to pay interest on the debt (which costs the nation $317.3
billion each year) that is to pay off domestic and international bond
holders/global finance capital.

* $60 went to
"income security," including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families,
Supplementary Security Income, and various programs for families and
kids.

* $40 went to
education: all federal expenditures on elementary, secondary, higher
education and federal research and general education assistance.

* $37 went to
benefits for veterans (which some analysts would include under
“military”).

* $27 went to
nutrition spending, including Food Stamps and all child nutrition
programs.

* $20 went to
housing: all federal housing assistance.

* $14 went to
environmental protection.

* $ 3 went to job
training.

"Defense" (empire)
outweighed education by more than 7to 1; income security (for the poor) by
more than 4 to 1; nutrition by more than 10 to 1; housing by 14 to 1;
environmental protection by 20 to 1; and job training by 95 to 1. The
military accounts for more than half of all discretionary -- not
previously obligated -- federal spending.

And don't be fooled
by the number two ranking for health care. Most of that $200 is a transfer
payment to the corporate-medical-industrial complex, just as much of the
“defense” budget is a transfer payment to such giant corporate masters of
war as Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing. US governmental per-capita
health expenditures are higher than those of some nations with national
health insurance plans (including France and Germany) because of America's
inordinately high doctor salaries, skyrocketing drug prices in the US
(where consumers flex little countervailing bargaining power against the
market-setting capacity of leading pharmaceutical corporations), and the
flood of paper work and bureaucratic bloat in the private (corporate)
"health" sector.

The NPP also breaks
down the social costs of the Iraq occupation. As of April 6, 2006 at 5:30
PM, the NPP reported, Washington’s imperial war of choice on Mesopotamia
had cost more than $271 billion. With that same sum of money, the NPP
calculated, the United States could have: enrolled 30,923,096 U.S.
children in Head Start for one year; provided health insurance for one
year to 162,406,756 children; built 2,442,073 additional housing units;
hired 4,700,260 additional public school teachers for one year; and given
13,148,101 Americans a four-year college scholarship at a public
university.

KING'S FORGOTTEN
LEGACY: "THE TRIPLE EVILS THAT ARE INTERRELATED"

The day on which the
New York Times story about Chavez’s “extravagant foreign policy”
(Negroponte) appeared -- April fourth -- happened to mark the 38th
anniversary of the assassination (or perhaps state execution) of the great
civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. King, it is haunting to recall,
was killed exactly one year after he delivered his famous “Time
to Break the Silence” speech denouncing the Vietnam War at
the Riverside Church in New York City.

By the time of that
famous oration, King was regularly speaking and writing against what he
called "the triple evils that are interrelated": militarism, poverty, and
racism. "I [can] never again raise my voice against the violence of the
oppressed in the ghettoes," King said, "without having first spoken
clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own
government." He was moved to speak out on Vietnam, he said, by
"allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism."
His Christian-humanist values meant that he could not watch passively as
"as we poison" the Vietnamese peoples' "water, as we kill a million acres
of their crops," and "send them into the hospitals, with at least twenty
casualties from American firepower for one 'Vietcong'-inflicted injury."
The people of Indochina, King mused, must find Americans to be "strange
liberators" as "we destroy... their... famil[ies], village[s],... land
and... crops."

But focusing back on
the imperial homeland, King also noted that many young black Americans and
poor whites were in Vietnam because their poverty was so high and their
job prospects so low that enlistment looked like a step up. He observed
that the American government's resort to mass bloodshed in Southeast Asia
was undermining his ability to argue effectively for nonviolent resistance
to inequality and racism in American ghettoes. And he passionately decried
the fact that the U.S. government's decision to pour tens of millions of
dollars into the "crucifixion of Southeast Asia" (as Noam Chomsky once
aptly described an American military assault that killed 3 million
residents of that region) was undercutting its ability to deliver on the
"promissory note" of social justice it had started to write with its
briefly declared "War on Poverty." "With the resources accruing from the
termination of the war, arms race, and excessive space races," King told
the US Senate in 1966, "the elimination of all poverty could become an
immediate national reality. At present," he bitterly observed, "the war on
poverty is not even a battle, it is scarcely a skirmish." "Defense"
expenditures in Vietnam, King knew, were strangling the anti-poverty "war"
in its cradle.

Struggling against
the toxic, interrelated logics of empire, inequality, and racism, King
called for "a radical reordering of the nation's priorities." By 1967, he
went public with his determination that that "reordering" required
"restructuring the whole of American society." "A nation that continues
year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs
of social uplift," King warned, "is approaching spiritual death."

Nearly four decades
after King's death, the U.S. government dishonors the now officially
iconicized civil rights leader's officially forgotten anti-imperialist and
social-justice legacy by prioritizing militarism over social provision and
health like no time in memory. It is once again sacrificing domestic
social and economic needs to the extravagant costs of waging an imperial
war for “so-called freedom” (King on the Vietnam War) abroad.

Adding Orwellian
insult to injury, the leading imperial terror manager Negroponte has the
unmitigated gall to falsely accuse a relatively small and populist Latin
American state of sacrificing its domestic social health to an expensive,
expansionist, and “extravagant foreign policy.” And the United States'
leading “liberal” newspaper, which guards the leftmost boundary of the
narrow moral-ideological spectrum in a spiritually dead “mainstream”
media, naturally refuses to call the imperial functionary on his
astonishing and odious hypocrisy.